1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to an improved data processing system for processing and displaying messages. Still more particularly, the present invention provides a computer implemented method, data processing system, and computer program product for allowing a user to quickly and directly provides a response in an instant messaging conversation.
2. Description of the Related Art
Instant messaging (IM) is an online chat medium, allowing users to communicate with each other and to collaborate in real-time over a network data processing system. Instant messaging is commonly used over the Internet. Instant messaging applications monitor and report the status of users that have established each other as online contacts. This information is typically presented to a user in a window. Instant messaging applications also are often used by users conducting business. By utilizing instant messaging, business users can view each other's availability and initiate a text conversation with colleagues or customers when a desired contact becomes available. Millions of users communicate using instant messaging systems every day. With instant messaging becoming an important part of both personal and business communications, functionality and usability enhancements are important to the continued success of this type of communication tool.
Users of instant messaging clients often maintain multiple instant message conversations simultaneously. It is not unusual for users to have ten or more instant message conversations ongoing at the same time. A user may converse both in individual and group contexts.
Due to the design of current instant messaging clients, tasks such as monitoring a user's conversations, switching among the conversations, and coordinating instant messaging windows with other application windows often becomes problematic. Typically, instant messaging clients employ native operating system windowing and task switching mechanisms. Both of these approaches in current instant messaging clients are problematic for the following reasons:
1. Task Bar or equivalent. Instant messaging clients such as AOL® Instant Messenger™, a product of America Online, Inc., Lotus® Sametime®, a product of International Business Machines Corporation, and MSN Messenger®, a product of Microsoft Corporation, use a windows task bar to enable switching between conversations. Switching between conversations in this manner is an unnecessarily laborious and error-prone process. Consider, for example, a user who has five or more chats grouped in the windows task bar. When a new message is received, the task bar may be highlighted. Users must click on the task bar, identify the chats where new turns have taken place (often with a highlighted icon or user name), and then navigate through the chat windows serially in order to read new messages, to decide whether to respond, and to draft a response. The above steps must be repeated for every chat window that has received a new message. New messages often come in at the same time the user is reading and responding. A user must return to the task bar repeatedly, without an indication of the number of new messages within a chat, who has sent the messages, or the importance or relevance of the incoming message to the user's ongoing work. This process is clearly a disruptive and ineffective means of managing communication. Consider a second example in which a user has five chats open separately on the task bar. The user must click on each of these chats serially to pop up the chat window in order to see the changes. The task bar often must overflow to the next row or expand the task bar. Because of these hidden windows, users often do not know that they have received new messages.
2. Automatic pop-up of chat windows. For many users, this alternative to using the task bar to switch among chat windows tends to be even more disruptive, since the automatic pop-up of chat windows interrupt the user's current work. Messages pop up (e.g., are brought to the forefront of the user's desktop) without regard to the messages' importance and a user must use a pointing device, tabs, or an equivalent to minimize the window. Often the same window will pop up again as soon as it is minimized, because a user on the other end of the conversation has entered a new message in the window. Pop-up windows also tend to capture inadvertent user input, with messages sent to the wrong person. These reasons mentioned are among the many reasons auto pop-ups are not chosen by the vast majority of users. For many, pop-up windows are regarded as an undesirable nuisance.
Thus, it would be advantageous to have an improved mechanism for informing users of incoming messages. It would further be advantageous to allow users to quickly monitor and switch among chat conversations in an unobtrusive fashion, as well as allow users to select the chats the user wants to respond to and the chats to monitor.